Warhol and Goldsmith settle Price photo copyright case

It’s been a long saga that has gone as far up as the Supreme Court. However, it appears as though the Warhol Estate and photographer Lynn Goldsmith have agreed to settle their fair use copyright dispute.

The joint filing said that Warhol’s estate would pay Goldsmith more than $21,000, including $11,000 in court costs. It was submitted to a New York Federal court last week.

Goldsmith photographed the musician Prince in 1981 for a magazine. Andy Warhol then made several pieces of art from the photo without permission or credit to Goldsmith. Bizarrely, it was the Warhol Estate that initiated the court proceedings in 2017 as a ‘pre-emptive strike’ against Goldsmith making a claim on the work.

The court case went through ever increasing circles of litigation, finally ending up in the Supreme Court. They ruled that Goldsmith was in the right, and there was no fair use of the image. Subsequently, Goldsmith was left with a staggering $2.5million of court costs, and ended up selling her house to help cover it.

The Warhol Foundation’s law firm, Latham & Watkins, said in a statement that the estate was “happy to put this litigation to rest and move forward with its work supporting up-and-coming artists.”

It’s a little unbelievable then that Goldsmith would agree to a paltry $32,000 in restitution from the Warhol Estate. By perhaps she is completely fed up with the whole thing, and it’s high time to lay this dispute to rest.

I don’t disagree.

[via reuters]

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